October was the most active month in the history of the Black Gate blog, breaking every traffic record on the books. The month’s top articles were accessed some 10,000 times each, and our new line of weekly Black Gate Online Fiction kept our webserver working overtime.

10,000 times? Wow. I hadn’t guessed The disparity between the number of comments in each thread and the number of readers is mind-blowing. I had sort of gotten used to the idea of 50,000 people a month skimming over the opening paragraph of my post, pre-cut, but I’m not sure what to do with the idea that my best posts now get 65,000 skimmers plus 10,000 clickers.

Did you know that, when a Poet Laureate of the United States publishes a new volume of poetry with a major house such as, say, Farrar Strauss Giroux, the book is considered a roaring commercial success if it sells out a print run of 6,000 copies? Okay, it surely matters that nobody has to pay hardcover book prices to read a blog. Even so, I’m disoriented.